Hi folks,
I just recently started experimenting with Deadline 10 and its AWS Portal feature. I’m currently running jobs on the “Large” instance preset, which is mostly using c4.8xlarge instances, but I was curious if it is possible to use some of the newer-generation instances, such as the c5.9xlarge.
These don’t currently show up on the list of instance types when I attempt to boot a spot fleet. Is there any tricks to add newer types to the list of instances supported?
Best,
Lucas
The list of instances is pulled dynamically from the AWS Region and Availability Zone where the Infrastructure was launched. Some instance types might not be available in all Regions. In fact, some instance types might not be available in all AZs, for example N.Virginia has 6 AZs, but only 4 have g3 GPU instances, so g3 could be missing depending on the AZ where the Infrastructure was launched. We plan to fix this in the future by querying all AZs…
In your case, we need to know your Region. Do you see c5 instances in your Region via the AWS Console under EC2 > Spot Fleets > History?
Thanks for the reply—just tested this by making sure the infrastructure booted in us-east-1a and I can see c5 instances now. It looks like two of the us-east AZs don’t have C5’s yet, so I suppose I got unlucky with which region was auto-selected when I set no preference.
Querying all AZs would be a good betterment but now that I know how it works, the current state is definitely workable. For my workload at least, the c5 seems to shave off ~30 seconds per frame at roughly the same cost, so it’s a win.
While I’m at it, would be nice for future versions if the GUI instance type page could show the current price by availability zone. I want to say it currently shows an average, but sometimes there’s a 20-30 cent price difference across AZs and I’ve found the bid can reliably be set lower than whatever price Deadline shows. So I often go off that price history page you referenced.